Book review: Outsider II by Brian Sewell

HE HAS been beaten with a wet umbrella, punched in the eye by a young painter and pummelled by leather-clad lesbians. Welcome to the mad, bad, occasionally sad but never dull world of London Evening Standard art critic Brian Sewell.

That he inspires such rage is perhaps a credit to him in a world where so many critics, he asserts, massage their critical outpourings to bow to fashion.

His first volume of memoirs was called Outsider: Always Almost: Never Quite. Given that his second volume is Outsider II, it is clear that Sewell continues to feel such isolation. Little wonder. In Outsider II, he lambasts fellow critics, former colleagues, the BBC and the big auction houses. With each, admittedly wildly entertaining, swipe it feels as though Sewell is settling scores.

He is waspish, indiscreet, comical and utterly outrageous in his put-downs, particularly in the bile he spews at a few hated fellow critics. He refers to an incident in 1994 when 35 art world “worthies” signed a letter sent to the Evening Standard editor accusing him of misogyny, insult and scurrility and of a “dire mix of sexual and class hypocrisy, posturing and prejudice” as well as being anti-gay.

There is a lot to laugh at, not least his diatribe on forgeries flooding the market

His loathing of the group he calls the “monstrous regiment masquerading as art critics and historians, not one of them of any reputation” is priceless. One of this number, Sarah Kent, the then-art critic for a listings magazine, is singled out.

“I was prepared to make a joke and bequeathed my eyes to Sarah Kent, the gushing art critic of Time Out, who is not blind but cannot see,” Sewell wrote of his intentions prior to a major operation. On reflection, however, he decided against such a generous act.

Ill health has plagued him and thoughts of death loom large (one chapter is simply entitled Death). He once told an Italian dealer he had known for 30 years that he had just had a heart bypass. “It was not your heart that needed to be bypassed but your tongue,” said the dealer.

There is a lot to laugh at, not least his diatribe on forgeries flooding the market. In one case, he offers: “If, when Christie’s feels less pained by this failure of connoisseurship, a researcher wishes to pursue the case, the whole collection can be found under the Stock Number DP 309.” The BBC was, he writes, “particularly vindictive if criticised”. His criticisms, he continued, “ensured my total exclusion from all its programmes (this is so still). I was far too maverick and subversive to be welcome in such bosom nookeries”.

he refers to Veronica Wadley, his former Evening Standard editor, as “incapable of realising how incapable she was”. Indeed, his pen has been so feared that when a retrospective of the artist David Hockney was put on at the Tate Gallery, one dealer specialising in his work asked him how much it would cost him for Sewell not to review the show.

However, he comes across as a man who is deeply loyal and kind to his friends. He became embroiled in scandal when Anthony Blunt, who had been his tutor at the Courtauld Institute Of Art, was exposed as the fourth man in the Cambridge spy ring in 1979. It was Sewell, by then friends with Blunt, who protected and supported him during the media onslaught that followed, devising decoys to throw the Press off the scent.

Ultimately there is a sense that Sewell feels he has not been given the platform he deserves. This tone, however, does not dominate what is an often hilarious, valedictory note from a rare breed: someone who says what he thinks and doesn’t care who knows it.